Saturday, February 27, 2016

US Bans Imports of Slave-Produced Seafood from Southeast Asia, and Other Goods

On Wed, President Obama signed H.R.644: the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015. The Act closes a loophole that allowed American imports of fish caught by slave labor in Thailand. The loophole was in the exemption in the US Tariff Act of 1930 that allowed goods produced by forced labor to be imported if “consumptive demand” for those products could not be met without them.The legislation stemmed from an AP expose claiming that a lot of the shrimp imported into the U.S. and sold at Walmart, Whole Foods and Red Lobster was harvested by trapped and enslaved workers in Thailand.The Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act signed by Obama on Wednesday eliminated the “consumptive demand” loophole, thus, banning the importation of goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or indentured labor. Read also: